How To Create a Watermark in Adobe Lightroom

Most of you know I watermark EVERYTHING that I put online. We could discuss the pros and cons of watermarking (branding, way for people to find you, identifies the image as yours in a visible way, gets in the way of appreciating the image, etc.), but that’s not the point of this post. I’ve been asked over and over again what the best way is to watermark images. And my answer is always, “That depends.” It depends on how you want to place your watermark (e.g., is it okay that it’s in the same place on every image), on whether your watermark is a single color or multicolored, how many images you want to process, and how many you want to do “by hand.”

I’m a diehard Photoshop guy, but I do probably 95% of my post processing, and all of my output from Adobe Lightroom (currently, version 5.5). Especially if I need batch processing with a watermark, in my opinion, there’s no easier way. (I know that there are OTHER ways, but I’m looking for the most efficient with the tools I have available to me – namely, Lightroom and Photoshop).

I created a couple videos a while back on how to create a graphical and a text-based watermark preset to apply on export in Adobe Lightroom 4. Fortunately, the process hasn’t changed at all in Lightroom 5, so the videos are still as valid today as the day I made them. I’ve been getting a lot of questions on this lately, so thought I’d resurrect those videos here. Sorry I don’t have a transcript, but they’re reasonably short.

Creating a Graphical Watermark Preset in Lightroom:

Creating a TEXT Watermark Preset in Lightroom:

Hope it helps! Please don’t hesitate to ask if I can answer any additional questions.